Are Video Games For Losers?

Video games, if you really think about them, usually aren’t all that fun. Compared to the comfort food of most modern television, a game like Temple Run or God of War is an unpleasant affair. No matter how many times you play Temple Run, you will always lose—and even if you get a high score, it’s probably not as good as Justin Bieber’s. So if we’re constantly confronted with our own failures in games, why do we keep playing them? NYU Professor and professional “ludologist” (read: video game researcher) Jesper Juul thinks that the constant experience of failure is actually what draws us to the medium.

“Failure in games tells use that we are flawed and deficient,” Juul writes in his new book “The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games.” This rude awakening gives games their artistic potential. “As such, video games are the art of failure,” he continues, “the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience and experiment with failure.”

Speakeasy spoke to Juul recently about his new book to hear his thoughts on the pleasure we find in games amidst all the “pain” he describes.

The photographer Richard Avedon once said that he felt “photography is sad art” because he felt that taking a photograph was capturing a moment that died immediately after it was recorded. Given the way you write about tragedy in “The Art of Failure,” do you see videogames as a tragic art?

In a sense, given the way they set you up for failure, games certainly set you up for tragedies that they create. I discuss Raymond Poulidor, who was second place in the Tour de France three times and third place five times. In a way, he could not have been a tragic figure without the Tour de France. So you could say that since games have this well-defined failure state and encourage you to put in insane amounts of time, there’s tragedy set up.

I suppose there’s also something melancholy about games. Many people have this moment where you’ve completed the game and there’s nothing left to be done. You can go back and play it again, but it’s not that interesting. There’s something sad about that moment where you don’t want it to be over. You’ve become good enough to beat it, and there’s no obvious way for you to keep growing except by doing insane things like speed runs.

You say that games not only give people the opportunity to experience failure, but also the chance to overcome failure—players rehabilitate themselves from failure by continuing to surpass it. But if we also experience this tragic feeling when we’ve finished a game and have no more obstacles to overcome, do you think there’s something addictive or alluring just about the idea of failing at something in the first place?

There are a few things. One, I don’t know if you know the idea of the hedonic treadmill? The idea is that: say you make $5,000 a year and your life is a complete struggle. Then you go to making $30,000 dollars a year—you can scrape by, you’re not starving. So you might think that making six times as much again could make you much happier. But it doesn’t work, right? It’s always very attractive to go from a lacking state to go to a state of non-lacking. One explanation could be that we always expect this to happen. If we expose ourselves to a failure, we can hopefully get out of it again. And that is a beautiful thing, in general.

But I also think that there’s some kind of lack-of-power fantasy in games since you are exposing yourself to a situation where you can’t really do much, where you feel screwed and worthless. Weirdly, you could call it an existential masochism? It’s hard to explain what that is, but I agree that there’s something fundamentally about failure that attracts you. And that is kind of funny! Of course, there might be this hope that you can climb out of it again. But there is this moment when you really aren’t feeling very good.

It was funny reading your book while playing games like Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, and God of War: Ascension—which are all about superhuman protagonists accomplishing superhuman feats. The allure of games, therefore, often seems to be the experience of becoming something that’s much less self-conscious and much more powerful than I am. I don’t think: “Playing Lara Croft is going to be awesome because I’m going to die so many times!” But you point out that games aren’t interesting unless we fail in them, as we so often do. So does the empowerment fantasy also necessitate failure? Or is empowerment what makes failure so interesting or dramatic in the first place?

There’s this funny thing that the power you feel in a game is inside the computer, right? The power fantasy is imaginary and the failure is real. It seems like you are really sitting there, and you’re a person who’s bad at playing Crysis. It’s failure that makes you think that you’ve accomplished something in the game. Because if you think you can just click the button and everything automatically happened, then you wouldn’t think it’s your fault or your responsibility. Failureis what makes you really feel that you’re doing these things that are happening on the screen that aren’t actually real.

It’s interesting in game with super-buff heroes where the fiction or ideal place is the one without failure. The embedded story is one you’re going through never dying. Once you add up all your saved games, there’s this path of this super-buff character that never fails. But of course to get there, you fail like a thousand times yourself!

But also, don’t you think that this kind of frustration and anger really is an important part of these games? It’s overlooked that video games have this lack of power, lots of moments of feeling completely worthless and terrible at things. And that, in a way, that really is what ties you to the game and makes you feel like you accomplished things at a later stage.

Still, when you try to introduce seemingly human narratives to game mechanics, failure can seem arbitrary. Whenever you kill a civilian in Assassin’s Creed, the game stops and reminds you that your character “did not kill civilians.” But by playing other open-world games like Grand Theft Auto, I’ve been trained as a player to do whatever the hell I want! So at moments like that, I wonder if there are ways that game designers could create more elaborate structures for failure, rather than confronting you with a screen essentially saying: “This is wrong because we said so.”

Well, in a way, open-world games are an attempt to do that. Video games started in the 1980’s with this arcade and adventure model where there is a rightthing to do. If you’re not doing that, you’ll reach game over. That also comes very directly from the fact that video games are games. Games tend to have goals, and players tend to get punished. There’s been a gradual realization in the history of video games that you can open that up; it’s not necessarily a problem if you allow people to do other stuff.

So if you’re playing Space Invaders, then failure is failure and that’s that. But now you have games where it’s more up to you. There might be an official goal like in the Grand Theft Auto series. Or there might be an up-to-you goal, like in The Sims. But how you interpret it is your decision. That creates a kind of freedom. It’s less harsh. If you’re playing GTA and you’re screwing up when trying to do something, you still get a cool explosion so it doesn’t feel particularly bad! This allows for more creativity.

The other side of that is the common criticism that games are “too easy” now—the sort of “back in my day” perspective lots of gamers have. But there’s some truth to that, no? Casual games sell players the acceleration of time as a way to skip through unpleasant or difficult parts of games. And in many so-called “art games” like Journey or Passage are actually difficult to fail. What do players and developers find appealing about these kinds of games?

One end is by necessity. In old games, even traditional board games, you couldn’t add a lot of content. Chess doesn’t have elaborate backstories and campaigns since it would be very difficult for those to actually pass through time. In early arcade games, failure was the easiest way to make content in a subjective way—if you experience something that’s veryvery challenging, then failure keeps forcing you to see the depths of the game mechanics and strategy. So it’s a way to create the perception of depth in a game even though there’s very little data in it. Now that you have even 100 megabyte downloads on your mobile phone, it’s much easier for a game developer to create variation by throwing content at the player—new levels, music, stuff like that.

But that can go so far that now many players describe recent games like Journey or The Unfinished Swan as being “experiences” rather than “games.”

The beauty of games generally is that you are free to focus on the optimization and the escape from failure. But it’s true that it also makes it harder to think of broader things while you’re playing. Removing the failure state is a way of opening that. If you’re under threat in a game—if you’re scared of termination, or game over, or what have you—then that sets the priority that you have to think about. The removal of that threat and the near-impossibility of failure in a game like Journey give you freedom to think of other things.

You can compare this to cinema or literature. There’s an argument that if you’re watching a movie and you can’t make heads or tails of it, then you assume: “Well, alright, this is probably something artistic.” You think of it in a different way. The same way with literature; if you read some words on a page and they don’t quite add up to full sentences, then you think, “Alright this is probably poetry.” The same thing is true of games.

I think that’s why I’ve never really liked open-world games that are so open they become “advanced hiking simulators,” to quote one Skyrim critic. While I complained about a game like Assassin’s Creed a minute ago, the directions it gave me also gave me a sense of what I was actually doing in that game. I wasn’t just wandering around aimlessly for hours, not really sure why I was wandering in the first place.

Yeah, it’s giving you an immediate goal. But it also means that you’re doing less mountain hiking, right? So it depends. I happen to like the mountain hiking part in Skyrim a lot. I like hiking, but I very rarely have the opportunity to do it these days, so it’s an important thing for me. If you want to stop and smell the roses, it requires that failure isn’t imminent.

It seems particularly interesting that Zynga is transitioning more and more of its business to online gambling. The casual games like FarmVille that have defined the company’s legacy are oppressively easy for some players. But games like Poker or Blackjack promoted by casinos in the first place because they have such high failure rates for their players.

Gambling and FarmVille are almost the same, and almost completely different. There’s very little explicit failure state in FarmVille. Your crops can whither [in FarmVille], but you can usually get out of it. From a development method, there’s great similarity. Game developers spend a huge amount of time poring over the data to figure out retention, the numbers that come out and the money that comes in. That’s very similar—this almost anti-romantic view of game design. And Zynga has promoted this philosophy when talking about its games.

Of course, it is very different in that FarmVille is about the aesthetic choices you make when building your “base.” But there’s also a twist to it in that games like FarmVille are tied to your own social media account. In a way, they’re kind of permadeath games without death. You have that one game session going on, and it never ends. But also that means that failure is a much more social thing. One of the things that I find very disturbing about playing games like that is that there are certain people that can make a farm look very good. And then I’m worried that my farm looks kind of crappy…it’s embarrassing to have a farm that looks crappy! So it’s not like the game is telling you anything, but you have a strong social pressure to perform well so when people visit your farm, they’ll think that it looks like you’re the kind of person who has it together and can create a pleasing space. That, I think, is a big pressure for the game’s monetization.

Many of the most addictive casual games are impossible to “win,” so to speak. I’m obsessed with Jetpack Joyride, for instance, and all that game entails is running as long as you possibly can before you inevitably die. But it also makes many of its challenges so simple that they seem more like ways to get you to spend money rather than real challenges—“buy this upgrade!” or something like that. Do you think the incentive to monetize games through microtransactions is changing our conception, either as players or game designers, of what it means to “fail” in a game?

I think this speaks to the fact that “causal” players don’t have anything in particular against failure in the first place. Rather, think of how a game like Solitaire can never be completed—since it’s a “transient” goal as discussed in the book—and how many of your Solitaire sessions end in failure. Jetpack Joyride is somewhat similar to Solitaire. In a funny way, the challenge of such a game actually makes it accessible to more players, because raising the challenge lowers the time needed to play per game session.

When microtransactions come in, it mostly messes with the time formula in that you are paying to skip a time investment. It feels very weird from a certain view of games as being a sacred space, outside the cares of money, et cetera. But it feels completely logical from the point of view that we are used to paying money to skip time—drop-off laundry comes to mind. It’s just that we tend to think of games as being special spaces where you can’t or shouldn’t buy your way past challenge or time.

Another way to link this to the real world is to bring up the concept of gamification. Failure, after all, has become something of its own buzzword for the innovation-hungry crowd of tech entrepreneurs. Are there ways that failure in games can teach us as people—not just “players”—to handle failure in our own lives more responsibly and maturely?

I worry about gamification in the book because such designs tend to disallow users to consider the meaning of failure. An organization may have a weird or imprecise performance measurement system such as student grades but won’t take into account either random fluctuations or the actual context—say, special needs classes. This is not too bad as long as everybody in the organizations understands what the numbers actually mean. But the risk is that gamification designers and business consultants start to claim that they are actually providing objective data. Well, then why would anyone teach a special needs class or do a risky operation as a surgeon? Gamification, in this sense, risks asking people to suspend their sound judgment. This is a risk exactly because gamification sometimes promises smooth operation with no judgments required.

As for broader lessons from failure in games, I do think that games are consistently hammering home the message that you will fail, but that success comes from effort and time investment. This is not a bad message by itself; it is always easy to imagine that success will depend on luck or qualities that you were born with, rather than effort. Incidentally, the focus on effort is also a recent thread in child-rearing.

Of course, games are also different from the rest of the world in that they make stronger promises for success. What game designers tend to get right is that games often show players very clearly what next steps they need to take in order to improve. Fitness, education, and the like can surely learn from this.

Jesper Juul’s “The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games” is now available from the MIT Press. This interview was edited from a Skype conversation and several emails for brevity and clarity.